@article{FerreinSchifferBooysenetal.2016,
  author    = {Ferrein, Alexander and Schiffer, Stefan and Booysen, T. and Stopforth, R.},
  title     = {Why it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa: Experiences from German South African collaborations},
  series = {International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems},
  volume    = {13},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems},
  number    = {5},
  issn      = {1729-8806},
  doi       = {10.1177/1729881416662789},
  pages     = {1 -- 13},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {Robots are widely used as a vehicle to spark interest in science and technology in learners. A number of initiatives focus on this issue, for instance, the Roberta Initiative, the FIRST Lego League, the World Robot Olympiad and RoboCup Junior. Robotic competitions are valuable not only for school learners but also for university students, as the RoboCup initiative shows. Besides technical skills, the students get some project exposure and experience what it means to finish their tasks on time. But qualifying students for future high-tech areas should not only be for students from developed countries. In this article, we present our experiences with research and education in robotics within the RoboCup initiative, in Germany and South Africa; we report on our experiences with trying to get the RoboCup initiative in South Africa going. RoboCup has a huge support base of academic institutions in Germany; this is not the case in South Africa. We present our 'north-south' collaboration initiatives in RoboCup between Germany and South Africa and discuss some of the reasons why we think it is harder to run RoboCup in South Africa.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{LimpertWiesenFerreinetal.2019,
  author    = {Limpert, Nicolas and Wiesen, Patrick and Ferrein, Alexander and Kallweit, Stephan and Schiffer, Stefan},
  title     = {The ROSIN Project and its Outreach to South Africa},
  series = {R\&D Journal},
  volume    = {35},
  journal   = {R\&D Journal},
  pages     = {1 -- 6},
  year      = {2019},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FerreinJacobsSchifferetal.2009,
  author    = {Ferrein, Alexander and Jacobs, Stefan and Schiffer, Stefan and Beck, Daniel},
  title     = {Robust Collision Avoidance in Unknown Domestic Environments / Jacobs, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Beck, Daniel ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  series = {ROBOCUP 2009: ROBOT SOCCER WORLD CUP XIII},
  journal   = {ROBOCUP 2009: ROBOT SOCCER WORLD CUP XIII},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Berlin},
  pages     = {116 -- 127},
  year      = {2009},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2011,
  author    = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  title     = {Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus},
  series = {Journal of Intelligent \& Robotic Systems},
  volume    = {63},
  journal   = {Journal of Intelligent \& Robotic Systems},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Berlin},
  isbn      = {0921-0296},
  pages     = {273 -- 300},
  year      = {2011},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FerreinSchifferLakemeyer2006,
  author    = {Ferrein, Alexander and Schiffer, Stefan and Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  title     = {Qualitative World Models for Soccer Robots / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  series = {Qualitative constraint calculi : application and integration ; KI 2006, 14 - 19 June 2006, Bremen, Germany ; 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence ; workshop / Stefan W{\"o}lfl ... (eds.)},
  journal   = {Qualitative constraint calculi : application and integration ; KI 2006, 14 - 19 June 2006, Bremen, Germany ; 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence ; workshop / Stefan W{\"o}lfl ... (eds.)},
  publisher = {Univ.},
  address   = {Bremen},
  isbn      = {3-88722-666-6},
  pages     = {3 -- 14},
  year      = {2006},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SchifferFerreinLakemeyer2010,
  author    = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander and Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  title     = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)},
  series = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)},
  journal   = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011)},
  pages     = {1 -- 10},
  year      = {2010},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FerreinSchifferLakemeyer2006,
  author    = {Ferrein, Alexander and Schiffer, Stefan and Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  title     = {Football is coming Home / Schiffer, Stefan ; Ferrein, Alexander ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  series = {PCAR '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Practical cognitive agents and robots},
  journal   = {PCAR '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Practical cognitive agents and robots},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address   = {New York, NY},
  isbn      = {1-74052-130-7},
  pages     = {39 -- 50},
  year      = {2006},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SchifferFerrein2018,
  author    = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander},
  title     = {ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age},
  series = {Multimodal Technologies Interact},
  volume    = {2},
  journal   = {Multimodal Technologies Interact},
  number    = {4},
  publisher = {MDPI},
  address   = {Basel},
  issn      = {2414-4088},
  doi       = {10.3390/mti2040064},
  pages     = {15},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human-robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FerreinSchifferLakemeyer2009,
  author    = {Ferrein, Alexander and Schiffer, Stefan and Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  title     = {Embedding fuzzy controllers in golog / Ferrein, Alexander ; Schiffer, Stefan ; Lakemeyer, Gerhard},
  series = {IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, 2009. FUZZ-IEEE 2009},
  journal   = {IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, 2009. FUZZ-IEEE 2009},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address   = {New York},
  isbn      = {978-1-4244-3596-8},
  pages     = {894 -- 899},
  year      = {2009},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{SchifferFerrein2016,
  author    = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander},
  title     = {Decision-Theoretic Planning with Fuzzy Notions in GOLOG},
  series = {International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems},
  volume    = {24},
  journal   = {International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems},
  number    = {Issue Suppl. 2},
  publisher = {World Scientific},
  address   = {Singapur},
  issn      = {1793-6411},
  doi       = {10.1142/S0218488516400134},
  pages     = {123 -- 143},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {In this paper we present an extension of the action language Golog that allows for using fuzzy notions in non-deterministic argument choices and the reward function in decision-theoretic planning. Often, in decision-theoretic planning, it is cumbersome to specify the set of values to pick from in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement. Also, even for domain experts, it is not always easy to specify a reward function. Instead of providing a finite domain for values in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement in Golog, we now allow for stating the argument domain by simply providing a formula over linguistic terms and fuzzy uents. In Golog's forward-search DT planning algorithm, these formulas are evaluated in order to find the agent's optimal policy. We illustrate this in the Diner Domain where the agent needs to calculate the optimal serving order.},
  language  = {en}
}